by Mike Telin
If you’re not quite ready to immerse yourself in concerts totally dedicated to music of the holiday season, you’re in luck. Beginning on Wednesday, December 9 at 7:30 pm at St. Noel Church in Willoughby Hills, guest conductor Stefan Willich will lead CityMusic Cleveland in the first of five concerts that will feature Cleveland Orchestra first violinist Miho Hashizume as soloist in both Piazzolla’s “Spring” from The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires and Vivaldi’s “Winter” from The Four Seasons. Mozart’s Symphony No. 41, K. 551 (“Jupiter”) will round out the performances. Check our concert listings page for additional days and times.
The concerts will also include Haydn’s joyful Sinfonia Concertante, Op. 84 for violin, cello, oboe, and bassoon. “I’m looking forward to playing the Haydn,” CityMusic’s principal cello Sophie Benn said during a telephone conversation. “I’ve played both of his cello concertos, but this piece is very different from either one.” [Read more…]
“There are a lot of world-music performers in the area that I would have loved to present over the years if I only had a space,” ethnomusicologist, world-music enthusiast, and promoter David Badagnani said during a recent conversation. “And with this series there is an additional opportunity for audiences to hear world-music performers in a different way.”
Steeped in desire, passion, and deceit, it’s no wonder that Tennessee Williams’ Pulitzer Prize-winning play A Streetcar Named Desire eventually found its place on the opera stage. On Friday, December 4 at 7:30 pm in Masonic Auditorium, Cleveland Opera Theater will present the Ohio premiere of composer André Previn’s and librettist Philip Littell’s 1995 opera based on Williams’ iconic play. The production will be repeated on Sunday, December 6 at 3:00 pm. (Left, Previn conducting the L.A. Philharmonic in 1986).
Composer Erwin Schulhoff, who perished in the Holocaust, wrote in his 1919 avant-garde music manifesto: The idea of revolution in art has evolved for decades…This is particularly true in music, because this art form is the liveliest, and as a result reflects the revolution most strongly and deeply — the complete escape from imperialistic tonality and rhythm, the climb to an ecstatic change for the better.
When Anglophones sing in a choir, they expect to encounter Latin, and perhaps some German. Spanish and French not so much, and rarely Finnish or Latvian. The 21 members of Quire Cleveland will find all those languages tripping off their collective tongues this weekend as the ensemble presents the seventh edition of “Carols for Quire from the Old & New Worlds.” Quire will sing three identical programs under the direction of founder Ross W. Duffin on Friday, December 4 at Trinity Cathedral and on Saturday and Sunday, December 5 and 6 at Historic St. Peter’s Church, all in downtown Cleveland (tickets available 
Former Cleveland Orchestra assistant conductor James Feddeck will return to perform in Cleveland this Sunday, but he’s leaving his baton at home this time. Feddeck will play a free organ recital in Gartner Auditorium at the Cleveland Museum of Art on December 6 at 2:00 pm, using one the other musical tools he honed at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, where he simultaneously studied oboe, piano, and conducting along with organ.
When Hedy Milgrom’s mother and relatives emerged from a cattle car at the Auschwitz concentration camp, the first thing they saw and heard was an orchestra playing on the train platform. “My mom turned to her sister and said, ‘See, there’s an orchestra here. There’s music. They’re playing violin. How bad could it be?’ Very bad, as they found out within minutes.”
Impressionism provides a unique intersection between visual art and music. You can draw parallels between what composers were writing and artists were painting in other periods — baroque, romantic, modernist — but “aha” moments come with remarkable spontaneity when you put Debussy and Monet side by side. It’s like art you can hear, and music you can see.
There was no Cleveland Orchestra when the Oberlin Conservatory of Music opened 150 years ago.
When Robert Walters performs the world premiere of Bernard Rands’ Concerto for English Horn with The Cleveland Orchestra on Friday, November 27 in Severance Hall, it will bring to fruition a composer-performer collaboration whose roots go back more than two decades.